back to article Tesla S P85+: Smiling all the way to the next charging point

The Tesla S is astonishing. I’d driven one around the London Docklands at a launch, but a week with one has me converted to merits of auto electricity. I have to admit I was sceptical. Electric car owners as a tribe can be quite hard work. They are always convinced that their cars are wonderful, even the ones with G-Wizzes. …

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  1. itzman
    Thumb Down

    If only..

    ..the laws of physics and chemistry allowed a cheap small, light, high capacity battery to be constructed...

    ..there wouldn't be a single IC car left on the roads.

    Sadly the Tesla here is as good as it gets and the battery is stupendously expensive, heavy and of dubious life.

    And there is no better technology on the horizon at all.

    I spent several weeks once, analysing electric cars. Its plus all the way until you get to that battery.

    I then spent time analysing all possible forms of known battery.

    Not one was good enough really. Maybe in time lithium air might be good enough, but there are huge practical issues.

    And none would be cheap enough.

    1. WonkoTheSane

      Re: If only..

      " If only the laws of physics and chemistry allowed a cheap small, light, high capacity battery to be constructed..."

      Or is it patent issue?

      1. Alex Walsh

        Re: If only..

        I remember the head of future tech at a large energy company once telling me that Dairy Milk has a higher energy density than any battery technology either available or predicted to come to market.

        It's now the biggest thing holding back tech developments IMHO :/

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If only..

          Dairy Milk is still not as good as petrol though (for powering your car).

          Cadbury Dairy Milk: 2210kJ per 100g, or 22.1 MJ per kilogram

          https://www.cadbury.co.uk/products/dairy-milk-2360?p=2360

          (click on "show nutritional information")

          Petrol: 42.4 MJ per kilogram

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_content

        2. FlatSpot

          Re: If only..

          @Dairy Milk - Probably not since they changed the recipe to make it cheap and nasty

      2. JeffyPoooh
        Pint

        Re: If only..

        Wonko The Sane "Or is it patent issue?"

        If those pesky patents could be solved, we'd have those secret 200 MPG carburetors!!

    2. Graham 24
      Boffin

      Re: If only..

      Two hundred years ago the world's best scientists would probably have agreed that putting 300 people in a metal tube and transporting them across the Atlantic in 6 hours was impossible...

      One hundred years ago the idea that you could pick up something the size of a cigarette packet and talk to someone in Australia would have sounded impossible...

      Today someone says that storing a high level of electric charge in something small enough and light enough to fit in a car is impossible...

      1. Chris Miller

        Re: If only..

        You're right, Graham. It may be that even as I type, some genius has thought of a better way to store energy*. Only it won't involve electrochemistry, because we understand these properties quite well and are already pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible and it's a similar story with capacitors. And if someone makes that discovery today, it'll be a decade or two before it can be fitted into something like a Tesla. So, unfortunately, this is as good as it gets, for quite a while.

        * Or maybe the Lockheed skunk works really will get their mini fusion reactor to work.

        1. Richard Boyce

          Re: If only..

          We need to eliminate the storage of a large amount of energy in the vehicle. Perhaps one day, roads will have built-in superconductors to supply energy to vehicles via induction. Then you'd need only enough energy to get to a major road.

          However, the advent of the aforesaid superconductors would probably change everything else beyond recognition, and the era of driving yourself in your own vehicle might draw to a close.

        2. Lusty

          Re: If only..

          We could store the energy as some kind of chemical in liquid form. Let's say for the sake of argument we use hydrocarbons. This would appear to kill two birds with one stone - we just need a way to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and knit it into the right molecule. With this technology we could then use nice clean energy to create the fuel wherever it's available and then burn it in tiny engines in the boot, tuned for electricity generation rather than propulsion. We could engineer the perfect internal combustion engine since we're making the fuel manually so we choose the size of molecule and piston to match perfectly for best efficiency. We wouldn't need such vast battery banks either which can't be bad, although I know they are very recyclable but it could reduce weight. The motor doesn't even necessarily need to run while the car is driving with a small bank of batteries, it could run while you're at work to top them up.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Coat

            Re: If only..

            "We could store the energy as some kind of chemical in liquid form. Let's say for the sake of argument we use hydrocarbons"

            You mean, like gasoline?

            1. Joe 35

              Re: If only..

              I think (OK, I KNOW) you missed the irony/humour there.

              1. Danny 14

                Re: If only..

                RTGs, I mean what can go wrong? They are a little bulky though and a "child sized" one will only generate about 100W but you wont have to worry about refuelling for 80 years.

                Or how about the nuclear stirling engine. A few hundred degrees and some Pu pellets in close proximity might make it a little unsafe for some people though :-) ....

      2. Christoph

        Re: If only..

        The more energy you store and the smaller and lighter the thing you store it in, the more dangerous it is when things go wrong and all that energy makes a break for freedom.

        There's an obvious long-term answer to the storage problem, but what happens when the isolation breaks down and all that anti-matter goes off at once?.

        1. DropBear
          Mushroom

          Re: If only..

          "...the more dangerous it is when things go wrong and all that energy makes a break for freedom"

          Sure, releasing that energy on purpose by someone trying to use your "fuel tank" as an explosive is not something you can solve - lots of energy in a small container can always be used nefariously. On the other hand, if we're just talking about safety without malicious intent, there can be a world of difference - both nitroglycerine and C4 are explosives, but one of them goes off at the drop of a hat, while the other isn't even ignited by a bullet. And I certainly don't think we need to worry about antimatter any time soon - now, if they ever invent hobby level 3D-printers that can churn out antimatter... yeah, then we might have a problem.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: If only..

            Interesting. How does the energy density of C4 compare with petrol? Could we make a car powered by C4?

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: If only..

            My Sinclair C5 had pedals for when the battery died... ahem.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Looking at the bright side

          > The more energy you store and the smaller and lighter the thing you store it in, the more dangerous it is when things go wrong

          Yes, but all the more spectacular! :-)

        3. James Micallef Silver badge

          Re: If only..

          "The more energy you store and the smaller and lighter the thing you store it in, the more dangerous it is when things go wrong"

          Correct... but keep in mind that currently the lightest and most compact energy store we have available is petrol, and we're pretty OK with handling it and driving around with a full tank of the stuff. And the Tesla is currently MUCH safer than any petrol/diesel car in case of accidents

        4. giin

          Re: If only..

          It's all fun and games until the antimatter goes off.

        5. Jedit Silver badge
          Headmaster

          "what happens when the isolation breaks down and all that anti-matter goes off at once?"

          I guess we'll never know.

          No, seriously, we'll never know - we'll have been converted to pure energy and hence will not be cognisant of very much.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If only..

        Electric cars have been around since the late 1880's. The same problem exists today and then, energy density. So far we have not been able to get enough energy is a small enough space to effectively compete with burning something to create heat that is changed into a rotating shaft.

        We need a more efficient means of creating electrical power.

        Batteries are a storage scheme to offset the inconvenience of a huge electrical power generation plant. We need to omit batteries from the equation.

    3. Sampler

      Re: If only..

      Sounds like they've got the leccy engines done right, so hydrogen fuel cells to power them instead of large batteries and you're good to go, you top up similar to petrol (ok, takes a little longer to fill the tank and you need to make sure you've got a positive lock on the nozzle, but hey, it's quicker than plugging in a battery).

      1. Malmesbury

        Re: If only..

        " so hydrogen fuel cells to power them instead of large batteries and you're good to go, you top up similar to petrol (ok, takes a little longer to fill the tank and you need to make sure you've got a positive lock on the nozzle, but hey, it's quicker than plugging in a battery)."

        By the time you do a purge (O2 + Liquid H2 = Boom), chill the lines down (room temperature to absolute zero plus a smidge), load the H2, reseal the tank, the chap in the Tesla will have unplugged from the supercharger and left.

        1. werdsmith Silver badge

          Re: If only..

          "By the time you do a purge (O2 + Liquid H2 = Boom), chill the lines down (room temperature to absolute zero plus a smidge), load the H2, reseal the tank, the chap in the Tesla will have unplugged from the supercharger and left."

          Or you could use something like one of the Chevrolet Equinox or the Honda FCX Clarity and fill up in a few minutes. From already existing filling stations.

        2. Greg J Preece

          Re: If only..

          By the time you do a purge (O2 + Liquid H2 = Boom), chill the lines down (room temperature to absolute zero plus a smidge), load the H2, reseal the tank, the chap in the Tesla will have unplugged from the supercharger and left.

          So what about that one Honda made years ago, that's been demonstrated and doesn't seem to take more than a few minutes to fill?

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: If only..

        hydrogen fuel cells are nice, but raw hydrogen is not.

        Seriously.

        It's nasty reactive stuff which shags just about everything it's left in long-term contact with ("hydrogen embrittlement"), with the problems being exacerbated if you do things like pressurise it(*).

        And of course there's the issue of how to produce it as it doesn't exist in nature. You can strip carbon atoms off of hydrocarbons (CO2 output) or electrolyse water - which is pretty inefficient and only really viable if you have lots of cheap hydro or nuclear sources.

        There are a number of more viable solutions for longer trips if you have a leccy vehicle. Nissan provide an alternate car for 14 days/year free of charge if you have a Leaf. Many EV enthusiasts have rigged up "pusher trailers" or generator trailers for such work. After all - even in a Tesla - at legal speeds you're only pulling a couple of kW as a long-term average.

        (*) It's hard to pressurise. Hydrogen molecules don't like each other much and always have to be bound to something else to increase packing desnity. There are twice as many hydrogen atoms in a litre of diesel than there are in a litre of liquid hydrogen and you don't have to go through all the pesky compression/cooling/heating stages to get there. Metal hydrides are promising as a storage system but they've been "promising as a storage solution" long before I started looking into hydrogen powered vehicles nearly 40 years ago.

        "Range Anxiety" is mostly a term used to scare people away from EVs. Once you start opening up to the many alternatives to "use this car for every single job you can think of", the pressure goes away.

        1. MJI Silver badge

          Re: If only..

          1) Nissan - can we borrow a GT-R?

          2) Power - I have a few suggestions

          a) A slot in the road with conductors each side, giant Minic

          b) Metal mesh on road, and above road, like bumper cars.

          c) Lorry replacement, special metal roads, power from a wire above them and a special electric

          lorry tractor unit which pulls lots of trailers, well guess what that is!

      3. BitDr

        Re: If only..

        I don't understand the down votes on this one. A fuel cell in conjunction with super capacitors or batteries (preferably the former) is a good solution. H2 storage is problematic but the biggest problem is the stigma created by the Hindenburg disaster. If the Titanic had that kind of power over ships there would be no cruise-ship vacations. That meme is much more difficult to overcome than anything else.

        On another note, electric motors are not engines. The lump under the bonnet is not a motor it is an engine. What's the difference? A motor converts one form of energy directly into another (electrical to mechanical), an engine has one extra step. It employs a chemical process to liberate energy from a fuel and then converts that energy into another form. Or think of it this way, an engine powers a motor, a motor can not power an engine.

        Batteries and fuel cells are engines, a super capacitor is a storage vessel, like a high-pressure gas-cylinder or a tightly wound spring.

    4. Mike Arnautov

      Re: If only..

      I remember reading some time in the 80s a thoughtful and regretful explanation why mobile phones were an impossible dream. To get the kind of power you would needwould require a small hand-cart full of batteries, making nonsense of the whole idea. The laws of physics said "no" and that was that -- enjoy reading about such devices in sci-fi stories, but it ain't gonna happen.

      1. Chris Miller

        @Mike

        Since the first cellular 'handheld' (though it did weigh >1kg, so you needed strong hands) phone was demonstrated in 1973, and commercial systems were operating in Japan by 1979, I think your memory may be faulty.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: If only..

        "To get the kind of power you would needwould require a small hand-cart full of batteries"

        It still would. The solution was to reduce the kinds of power needed through electronic miniaturisation and optimisation.

        Unfortunately with EVs you're into moving lumps of "stuff" around at XYZ speed and overcoming air friction plus rolling resistance, etc.

        Reducing the cage mass has been tried, but having seen the 30mph crash tests of a Gwhiz I wouldn't sit in one any more than I'd sit in an old-style Mini or Rover Metro. Aerodynamic design can help a little, but below 35mph (which is where most cars spend most of their lifetime) it makes bugger-all difference if the CD is 1.0 or 0.18.

        Electric motors are already very efficient and increasing those further from 85% to 100% would only add 10-15% range (apart from being impossible anyway)

        None of that matters though. As long as you have enough stored energy to cover 90% of vehicle needs, the other 10% can be covered via other methods. You wouldn't drive to Greece without making lots of preparations, but noone thinks twice about jumping on a plaine and hiring a car at the other end and a trip from London to Manchester can easily be handled the same way, etc.

        Of more importance than any of that is the creaking infrastructure underpinning things. Having charge points everywhere is of no use if they're broken. Nor is it any use if the power distribution network is broken - and in places like London it's running on the ragged edge of oblivion - not in terms of power being shipped into the metropolis, but in terms of the existing cabling being able to cope. Almost all of those "under road explosions" which occured during 2013/2014 weren't gas - they were distribution cables blowing apart under the strain.

        For a good example of what happens when the demand is higher than infrastructure can cope with and shareholder demands prevent adequate investment in maintenance/upgrades, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Auckland_power_crisis.

        What's not mentioned there is that whilst it proved to be pretty easy to charter An124/6s to bring in large container-sized generators, there simply weren't enough of them available worldwide to meet needs. Now scale that up to a population 10-50 times larger than that affected and things go seriosuly cockeyed. Add in the other disruptions that Peter Gutmann described at https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/mercury.txt (eg, sprinkler systems triggered by power outages trashing entire office buildings, plus the fact that most of Auckland lives in low rise buildings) and you start to have the makings of a serious crisis.

        EVs are a good thing. Mass adoption of EVs without adequate preparation may not be.

      3. cambsukguy

        Re: If only..

        Not to mention the impossibility of sending High Definition TV over the air - "There would only be enough bandwidth for one HD channel".

        And, who knows if they ever can get above 56kbps on a twisted pair copper wire, I hope they do.

        Still, there is some truth to this, not least, the appalling 'improvements' to battery tech we have had in the last, say, 20yrs, not going too well at the minute.

        I was of the opinion that they would pour the battery into every crevice, making the object (say a mobile phone) out of battery and a thin skin. This would simply mean that there was twice as much battery space used and twice as much charge stored.

        Do that with a car using all those crevices and just maybe.

        Mind you, every other car I see these days is very tall, this Tesla isn't. If it was, the storage would be twice as much (and the Hulk probably couldn't tip it over).

        It would weigh more than an Abrams M1 tank and cost about the same presumably but, if they get that chemistry improved weight wise, some hope exists.

        Remember, Petrol/Diesel fuel is extraordinary stuff but a fuel tank is only about 60 litres (on my car), The Tesla reviewed here has nearly 2000 litres of space as well as the battery it already contains (not including where the driver and passenger sit).

        So, a lighter, cheaper battery with the same charge density *does* make a leccy car viable, especially the larger family sized SUV-pretender types - which, conveniently is a perfect demographic for buying them.

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: If only..

          Except that it does not exist, and certainly will not exist in the next decade.

          The massive improvements in computation and radio (cellphone, TV etc) have come from efficacy improvements - doing more useful work with the same amount of energy.

          In a vehicle the useful work is purely energy conversion - absolute maximum of 100% efficiency.

          Electric motors and motor controllers already exceed 90% efficiency, and thus cannot ever get more than 10% better.

          Even assuming we can somehow get that back into the battery, it is still not enough by the fundamental laws of motion - air resistance, rolling, simple increase in vertical height!

        2. NumptyScrub

          Re: If only..

          Not to mention the impossibility of sending High Definition TV over the air - "There would only be enough bandwidth for one HD channel".

          And, who knows if they ever can get above 56kbps on a twisted pair copper wire, I hope they do.

          The 56k limit is because you have to fit an analogue signal into a 64kbit digital channel. If you need to fit an analogue carrier inside a 64kbit digital transmission channel, 56k is about as good as you are going to manage, even with today's technology. We already had far superior "data transfer over twisted pair" options before V.90 hit.

          If you want to compare the 2, here's the timeframe for Ethernet versus the timeframe for modem development. 10Base-T (10Mbit, 1990) is contemporary with the ITU V.32 standard (14.4kbit) in 1991, and V.90, (56kbit, 1998) is contemporary with the first Gigabit / 1000Base-T ethernet standards.

          ADSL services were first patented in 1988, or at the point dialup modems were about to go from 9.6kbit to 14.4kbit. The kit was apparently horrendously expensive up until the late 90s though, which is potentially why consumer takeup (and market presence) was extremely low up to the turn of the century. Still, by the time V.90 hit, DSL services had been around for a decade, and you could get a 512kbit or 2Mbit service for a "reasonable" price (aka less than 3 figures per month).

      4. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: If only..

        "I remember reading some time in the 80s a thoughtful and regretful explanation why mobile phones were an impossible dream"

        That was very early 80s then, because DynaTac appeared in 1983 and I was owning and using one in 1984.

      5. StudeJeff

        Re: If only..

        But remember they were basically talking about radio telephones, and we still can't make that sort of phone as small as a cell phone, the technology is totally different.

        Much like the video phone demonstrated at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. We now have such phones (sort of), but the technology is dramatically different from anything they could have imagined in 1964.

        For electric cars to become real competitors to gas cars (or petrol as you Brits prefer) we really do need something better than batteries, either something like a bacitator, a fuel cell, or my favorite (and least likely) a "Mr. Fusion" that can be fed with banana peels and stale beer!

    5. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Tim Jenkins

        giant Scalextric tracks

        "...stick a couple of metal brushes on the bottom of the car..."

        Bit of a pain having to stop every few miles to clear off the cat fur and stray pubes, though...

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. joewilliamsebs

        Re: If only..

        Nah. You'd have to keep pulling over to the hard shoulder to smooth them out again, and don't get me started on the cat fluff.

      3. Benchops

        Re: If only..

        > All you actually need to do is stick a couple of metal brushes on the bottom of the car, and turn all pedestrian free roads into giant Scalextric tracks.

        This actually ties in with my idea of burying all high voltage cables under roads to

        a) remove unsightly power lines

        b) underheat roads so they don't get ice

        c) make DAMN sure no-one digs up a road unnecessarily!

    6. James Micallef Silver badge

      Re: If only..

      Firstly, even the technological marvel that is the current Tesla battery is still a long way from the limits imposed by physics and chemistry. Secondly, the laws of physics and chemistry can only have a say in the "small, light, high capacity" part of your 4 requirements.

      The "cheap" part is only marginally constrained by physics and chemistry. It is mostly constrained by technology Return on Investment requirements (new tech is expensive and gets progressively cheaper) and volume (units produced in higher quantity are cheaper).

      It's not out of the question that within 10-15 years' time these batteries are produced in millions rather than thousands, and then you could buy a VW (or Ford, Hyundai etc) that is the same size and has the same range as the current Tesla S for the same price as you would pay now for a Passat or equivalent. It would probably not be as fast or sporty as Tesla S, but it wouldn't need to.

    7. Tom_

      Re: If only..

      Store the batteries in hyperspace and they can be as big as you like. It's not rocket science.

    8. Nigel 11

      Re: If only..

      It's not a battery problem so much as an infrastructure problem.

      A 200 mile range becomes OTT and 100 miles is all one would really need, if electrical charging facilities become ubiquitous. (Ie, guaranteed at every parking bay in every supermarket, mall, workplace, city street, home or visitor attraction).

      At the moment, things are like they probably were in the early days of IC motors, when finding somewhere that sold gasoline could not have been taken for granted. (And at 20? 10? 5? mpg, I don't imagine that the range of a mark one car was much to write home about either).

      Chicken, meet egg.

      1. Greg J Preece

        Re: If only..

        A 200 mile range becomes OTT and 100 miles is all one would really need

        ....In Europe.

        Yeah, if I were still living in England then that range would be perfectly acceptable. It'd be a very rare occasion indeed that I'd do more than 200 miles in one trip. In some parts of North America, the scale is very different. Long road trips are actually quite common - numerous friends of mine have driven to California and back in the past year, from Canada! To me that's an astonishing thing, to so casually drive the entire west coast of the US, but to them this is just what you do when you live on that scale and petrol is cheap.

        1. Greg J Preece

          Re: If only..

          I forgot to add that if we can't make better batteries, then the infrastructure becomes the biggest issue here. Hearing that a decent charge can be gotten in 15 minutes at the right charger is great - regular stops aren't massively uncommon - but arriving to find those chargers broken, or inadequate, or just not being able to find them at all, kneecaps the whole shebang.

        2. Kunari

          Re: If only..

          An all EV trip across the US? Possible but not really practical, Tesla is building charging stations along the major freeways to make it work. A more realistic approach is, like the Chevy Volt, to have a small ICE (or other generator tech) to extend the range. Not a perfect solution, but a practical one with today's technology. Emissions would still be much lower than an traditional ICE car for the same trip.

          About a year ago IIRC, I read an article about a fuel-cell that used Propane (or other LP gas) fuel, that had lower emissions than traditional gas engines. Also another article about a group that was developing a small CO2 scrubber to lower greenhouse gas emissions too. Wonder if both could be combined into a greener hybrid platform.

    9. Benchops

      Re: If only....

      > the laws of physics and chemistry allowed a cheap small, light, high capacity battery to be constructed...

      Ye cannae change the laws o' physics, captain!

    10. yeeking

      Re: If only..

      'Chemists one step closer to new generation of electric car battery

      ... Their discovery of a material that maintains a rechargable sulphur cathode helps to overcome a primary hurdle to building a lithium-sulphur (Li-S) battery. Such a battery can theoretically power an electric car three times further than current lithium-ion batteries for the same weight - at much lower cost...'

      http://phys.org/news/2015-01-chemists-closer-electric-car-battery.html

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